


What you deserve

by Lascylla



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anger, Angst, Other, revenge?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 05:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13228929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lascylla/pseuds/Lascylla
Summary: It was like trying to fit together the broken shards of a mirror, she reflected, watching his bizarre face contort with disjointed agony. None of the pieces really sat right, all jumbled and scraping against each other, trying to fit where they don’t. Where they never did. [Hermione 'fixes' Voldemort]





	What you deserve

It was like trying to fit together the broken shards of a mirror, she reflected, watching his bizarre face contort with disjointed agony. None of the pieces really sat right, all jumbled and scraping against each other, trying to fit where they don’t. Where they never did. 

She felt no need to reach out to him, to comfort him. This was his choice, and he was a monster anyway. She had no room spare in her heart for compassion, full as it was with revulsion for the creature who had never given up on killing her best friend. Who hated her solely because of who her parents were.

Hermione was no buck-toothed bookworm anymore. At thirty, she was slender, elegant, with full curly hair, pale skin, and a permanently determined angle to her eyebrows. She’d grown into her hair and her face and, most importantly, her brain. She had been driven to success by her need to prove that she was not only worthy of being a witch, but that the wizarding world was bloody lucky to have her.

And she had succeeded, by anyone’s measure. Even his. She could never have predicted that her achievements would attract the attention of Voldemort.

So she stood, unmoved by the plight of this man who would have tortured and killed her when she was only a child, and watched him writhe. His prone frame contorted, wrenched back and forth like a marionette on the strings of an uncaring master, all bones and ghostly skin wreathed in black cloth, clattering against the ground. Like a shrunken corpse in its burial shroud, too long above ground, ready for the grave.

She would happily have put him there. Buried him six feet under and piled the dirt on his empty body, to finally be free of the threat of him. But it had never been in her to kill. 

She turned her back to him, sick of the sight of tears leaking from his too-human eyes. They might be red in colour, but they were human in shape. And they were pleading with her.

_Help me._

He should not have been conscious, but somehow he was resisting his body’s instincts, and she thought it must be magic. Keeping him aware - as he always must be - to guard against the knives ever-poised at his back. 

She could hear him writhing, and it nagged at her, catching at a thread of empathy she couldn’t quite keep hold of. And all at once she unravelled, spun with fury on her beautiful face, and knelt at his side. 

“You should be dead,” she spat, glaring hard into his weeping eyes. He stared back at her with unfathomable sadness, and she clenched her jaw against the urge to comfort him. She wished she could put him out, but tampering with his nervous system at this juncture could have all kinds of unexpected effects. Most of them would lead to his death, which would be only for the better, but the rest… if he survived, she could not predict the outcome. 

“I can do nothing for you,” she snapped, pushing away an arm that flailed too close to her.

His eyes abruptly became unfocused, and the jerky movements ceased. She leaned closer, inspecting his face warily and holding her hand near to his open mouth. His warm breath touched her skin and she pulled back, wiping her hand on her robes with distaste. 

“I’m… sorry…” He rasped, staring at her, seeing something she could only guess at. She swallowed, breathed, the breath catching in her throat, and watched as her handiwork came to fruition. 

The tears that fell from his eyes this time were borne of a different kind of mental agony to those before. This pain was the sorrow she had not even really hoped for. The knitting together of a patchwork of neuronal pathways that approximated a conscience. She gripped his hand in her own, too tight, she knew, and watched him feel the horrors he had wrought.

He thrashed and screeched and fought the rewiring of his brain for hours on end. The process itself should not have taken nearly this long, but she guessed that he – being made of stitched together fragments of soul and mind and body – was not all of him resigned to this. She thought it likely he was fighting himself at this point.

He was a little like both Frankenstein and his monster, all rolled up into one psychopathic freakshow of a person. He was his own villain and victim. 

Eventually he calmed. She wondered if he was dead, but she could see his chest rise and fall in shallow bursts from across the room. Her slender fingers dug into the flesh behind her elbows as she fought back vomit. Tears escaped her eyes and she let them, let herself feel a little of the horror of this day. She would not break - but in order not to, she would have to bend a little. She allowed a sob, a few minutes of silent tears, of violent trembling, and then wiped her face on the sleeve of her robe and went to check on him.

Still as a corpse, except for the now slow rise and fall of his breathing. A delicate probing spell told her what she suspected.

She had succeeded. He was whole, in a way he had never been before.

Now, he would suffer for his crimes.

She wondered if he would think it worth it, to have commissioned her to do this. 

She smiled a knife-like smile, and her victory tasted bitter.

“Enjoy,” she whispered, and gave him a swift shove with her foot, simply because she could. Because the monster of her childhood was lying there before her, at her mercy, and she had given him what he wanted.

And what he deserved. 

_I hope your guilt destroys you._

**Author's Note:**

> You know, I actually enjoy Voldemort as a character, but I think a badass grown-up Hermione would not be very gentle with him, given the chance to 'fix' him.


End file.
